Burn After Reading (2008)
At a glance, Dekitate High School appears to be an intriguing bundle of bits. There’s a dash of Princess Maker-like raising sims in the way I’m expected to guide one teenage girl through three crucial years of her education. The presentation and setting brings Tokimeki Memorial‘s school days to mind. And building to a budget based on certain needs is all a bit SimCity. Pulling such unusual styles together can create something incredible and new. Or, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed from the…
Last year I got myself a PO Box and started asking Internet strangers to send me a postcard, if they liked, rather than plain old email and contact forms. Since then, I’ve enjoyed an occasional surprise “postcard from the Internet”, and I’ve been collecting them on a page of their own. It was extra-surprising to receive a postcard from an in-real-life friend: somebody who knew my actual address1! What’chu looking at? I can’t put my finger on exactly why, but this bird actually gives me “Ele…
Photo by Milad Fakurian on UnsplashImagine you wanted to design a machine that would pull the maximum possible amount of money out of a person terrified of dying. You wouldn’t build it around the interventions that work. The interventions that work are boring, and worse than boring, they’re free, and a machine that recommends free things can’t sustain a market cap. You’d build instead a machine that waves continuously toward the frontier of biological possibility, telomeres and senescent cells…
So apparently there’s this new film, right, called “Young Washington”, and at the end of it, Kelsey Grammer talks directly to the audience. It’s not as if the film is breaking the fourth wall with a character suddenly turning to us, it’s more a separate advert that will presumably be ditched when this thing finally goes to streaming. But it’s Kelsey Grammer, he’s talking to the audience, and he’s asking them to buy more tickets to this film, whether or not they then go see it again. “With your…
I made a timelapse animation of sea level from 1993 to 2022. Do you notice the sea level seesaw in the Pacific during ENSO? Fascinating, isn’t it! What else do you observe? Sea level data: Fournier S., Willis J., Killett E., Qu Z. and Zlotnicki V. 2022. JPL MEaSUREs Gridded Sea Surface Height Anomalies Version 2205. Ver. 2205. PO.DAAC, CA, USA. Some interesting details. I set the video to 3x speed and it was still slow. For some reason, this Meta graphic is much faster with better colors as…
I can't recall if someone else originally came up with this saying or if I said it in some off-the-cuff comment and it just propagated, but since it's often attributed back to me, I'll relay it here regardless:Trying to delete yourself from the internet is like trying to take piss out of a swimming poolDepending on the publication, I'll tailor the saying to be either more broadly palatable or more, uh, "Australian", but the sentiment doesn't change: once data spreads on the internet, you can…
Now there are certain doors in life that are never meant to be opened. For me it's Groundhog Day having worked in automotive design for such a long time, but Area 57 (Sam's own words) within an automotive design studio is one of them.A mythical place whispered about in hushed tones where outsiders imagine dragons, laser sharks and at least one engineer who communicates entirely in CAD file extensions.Sam wandered in looking like he'd accidentally won a competition he didn't remember entering,…
This is a big free festival in Twickenham. I will be playing at 1 p.m. in the Eel Pie Pub, joined on the day by Ruth Tidmarsh, Lester Square and Karina Townsend
My favourite of the three Brontë sisters has always been Emily; although I love Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I love Wuthering Heights more and I also find Emily herself the most interesting and intriguing person of the three. When I came across this new biography by Deborah Lutz, then, I knew I wanted to read it. I’ve read other books about the Brontës – mainly fictional ones such as Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks and The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan (see my…
Friday 26 Jun 26 was International Day here & up the hill. Θ, my old roomie at The Institute, announced that she was bringing here research team away from the Mean Streets of SmallTown, Midlands . . . to get some fresh air and see some green fields. It was the end of a not-quite-record-breaking week of heat-wave and it was muggy hot in our kitchen. In prep for an alfresco tea-party I started putting up the garden parasol under the big old dying ash tree at the bottom of the yard. Two young…
Reading Time: 44 minutes Does it feel like a good idea to encourage a country with a not-insignificantly-problematic relationship to booze, a general vibe that might best be described as ‘a bit febrile’, and where the link between ‘poor national team performance’ and ‘really horrible spikes in all sorts of violence, not least domestic’, is PRETTY FCUKING CLEAR, to drink like absolute motherfcukers ahead of an emotional sporting tie which there are better-than-even odds they will not win? Well…
I woke at 4:20 and made the mistake of not getting out of bed immediately. Woke again at 4:55, too late for the morning run, so I went back to sleep. Long story short, if I sleep for eight hours or more I feel like absolute shit. Hungover without the drinking, headache and groggy. My max has always been six hours; four to six has been the working duration since high school, for a little over twenty years now. When this body gets more sleep than it requires, this is the bill. No…
It really hasn't been that long since my last update on not drinking alcohol this year, but this week I hit the six-month milestone and I wanted to reflect a bit on this achievement as I felt a lot more strongly than I had expected to, and these days, after blogging for a fair amount of time, it seems the only way I have left to do that is to put pen-to-paper/hand-to-keyboard. On Tuesday, after I had gotten home from work, I opened the I Am Sober app that is tracking the exact amount of time…
30 unblogged things I did in June Mon 1: Unblogged May got fewer than 20 comments, easily the smallest response yet, so either I wrote about dull things or perhaps this feature has run its course after eight years. Tue 2: The rain was so heavy that the Pearly King and Queen of Forest Gate had to shelter inside the entrance to Stratford station while lowering their umbrellas. Wed 3: There's now a Bluesky account, @diamondgeezerblog.bsky.social, which announces every new blogpost I write (and…
If you’re looking for the kind of easy, comforting supper that makes everyone at the table smile, these Garlic Butter Grilled Cheese Dogs are about to become a new favourite. They take everything we love about a classic grilled cheese and a good old-fashioned hot dog and bring them together in the most irresistible way — buttery, golden, cheesy, and just a little bit indulgent.This is one of those fun, simple recipes that feels like a treat without asking much of you in the kitchen. A quick…
Pride Month came to an end this week. We have been planning today's post for several weeks, which is why some of the news items date back to the early weeks of June. We wish we could have run this during Pride Month, but it worked better as a Friday post, and it wasn't completely ready to go by last Friday. If it helps, you can pretend we are still on the Julian calendar, and that today is therefore June 20, 2026. "Macho Man" Hegseth Doing Everything He Can to Create a Christian Nationalist…
For a while I assumed the relationship was simply doomed. Photography requires patience: you develop a project over months without knowing whether it’s working, improvement arrives slowly, the feedback loop runs on timescales that platform culture has trained people to experience as failure. For a generation whose entire media experience has been structured around instant response, this looks like a fatal incompatibility. I think that’s the wrong framing, and I’ve been slow to see why. Urban…
The New York Times has published An American Mosaic, an interactive map visualising the self-identified ancestry of Americans using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. The map is accompanied by an article which explores how today's America reflects centuries of immigration and migration.The map uses colour to show the dominant ancestry in each census tract, drawing on
From the desk of Benji Welner in the sky between Austin and the Hamptons. I continue to insist that winter is the best quarter at Stanford. And that late is better than never. Academics Classes were sort of hit-or-miss. I don’t know how that should translate into my enrollment practices going forward but I will certainly consider my options. ME103: Product Realization (Design and Making) Woah! As it turns out, metal is a big leap up from plastics. To quote a dazzlingly handsome fella’s project…
Setting sun reflects in the water at 5th St. in Hermosa Beach. 5thストリートのサンセット ハーモサビーチ、5thストリートの水面に映る夕日。
Player CharactersCai Singh Avery Skitnik Cosimo Loperfido Mark Nakamura Guanyat Secundo Emma Kowalski Ernest Finns (Sic) The good ship and crew arrived on Newcomb and were shuttled off to prison. The warden gave a big, self aggrandizing speech about the virtues of hard work and Mark Nakamura tried to ask a question but the guards beat his head in twice. Things got worse for Mark as later in the showers he was jumped by some fellow prisoners and got his head bashed in with a bar of soap in a…
Frontier LLMs are becoming infrastructure. People increasingly use them as the interface to the world's knowledge. They write software, learn, conduct research, communicate, and solve problems through them. As they become general-purpose infrastructure, they should increasingly be treated like other infrastructure. The closest historical analogy is the telephone network. Telephone companies made enormous upfront investments to build nationwide networks. Society allowed them to recover those…
Another “blast from the past” with The Explodo Boys, a Minnesota-based multi-genre band from 1979. The was original was an early James Brown release on the Federal label in 1960. It reached #72 on the Billboard charts before fading away into obscurity. When I made this recording the Explodo Boys band was on the verge of splitting apart. They had one last week booked at Bootlegger Sam’s and
What is Magic, Daddy? My little one asked. I can see myself in your eyes when you are smiling, I answered. I don’t know whether she got it or not, but she smiled.
In Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), the historian Allen C. Guelzo quotes the nineteenth-century English Liberal statesman Richard Cobden, who asked, “If the United States go wrong what hope have we of the civilized world in our turn?” Guelzo replies: “Preventing that wrong turn was what the preservation of the Union was about. Emancipating American slaves would remove the cause of that wrong, and make the Union worth preserving. But neither of them would be possible…
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, at a Meta town hall reported by Katie Paul and Courtney Rozen at Reuters: In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user. Conversations he was having “with our top…
Ever struggle with reconciling free will with the possibility of an all-knowing God? You are not alone. This article examines some wisdom from C.S. Lewis and my personal life experiences to reconcile these seemingly contradictory ideas. The post Reconciling Free Will with God’s Omniscience: Evidence from C.S. Lewis and My Life first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post Reconciling Free Will with God’s Omniscience: Evidence from C.S. Lewis and My Life appeared first on The Simple Catholic.
Buy an EMF meter before buying electronic toys for kidsThe Electromagnetic Field (EMF) is a health concern. The EMF causes ionization in the body, creating free radicals. These free radicals cause oxidative stress, leading to DNA damage and inflammation. And as with everything else bad, kids are more vulnerable than adults. Electronic toys and EMF Electronic toys, especially with moving parts, usually have a motor. And for that motor to function, a temporary magnetic field is created using the…
